


AU: Skeptic and Believer

by DarlaBlack



Series: Scenario: 5 Things [4]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-15 22:49:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15423375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: AU/5 Headcanons in which Mulder is the skeptic who walks into the basement office to find Dana Scully, believer.





	AU: Skeptic and Believer

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the tumblr challenge, "Give me an AU scenario, and I'll write 5 headcanons for it." Some truly amazing stuff came out of this challenge, most way better than mine.

**1.** “I’m looking forward to working with you,” he says when they meet, and he can see the smug disbelief in her eyes. “Oh, really?” She asks. When she stands, he is shocked at how short she is, but also at how her dynamism fills the small office. She has slides. She has “scientific evidence,” or so she claims. He follows her. He listens as she makes connections he would never have thought to make. And on their first night in the very plausible state of Oregon, she tells him about her youngest brother, Charlie, and how he died when he was very small. About how her military family, so strict, pretended that it never happened. And about how she’s had visions of Charlie her whole life—sometimes just dreams, yes, but other visions as well. She’s come to believe that he didn’t die the way her parents said he did. That the illness he suffered was something much more complicated. Much more insidious. Perhaps even purposeful.

And then they are laughing in the rain and she is so tiny but her belief is so big that already she is becoming the most powerful force in his life and he knows (oh he knows, but he won’t let himself even think it) that he is already in love with her.

 

**2.**  By the time the X-Files are shut down at the end of their first year together, Dana Scully has come to trust her partner more than anyone else in her life. She’d thought he was a spy at first, had been afraid he was some arrogant ladder-climber, hell-bent on tearing her work to shreds. But he’s quietly funny, whip smart on the science, and he doesn’t judge her beliefs. He tells her she’s wrong, of course, but he also listens. He makes her laugh, keeps her steady, makes her think before she leaps. And when he goes missing from his apartment that August, she goes berserk.

She’d not considered his personal background much—rich family from Martha’s Vineyard, younger sister who works in Boston—but the more she looks into it, especially into his father, the more suspicious she becomes. Not of him, but of the circumstances that brought them together. He reappears in a hospital almost a month later, unconscious, stripped clean of evidence. When he wakes, she tells him what she’s found, but he doesn’t want to believe.

She’s sure, absolutely sure, that he’ll leave her then. But when she returns to see him the next day, he reaches up to touch her face and says, “I had the strength of your beliefs.” She feels herself teeter at the edge, and then quietly tumble into love with him.

 

**3.**  It takes them two more years. They are tentative because of the dangerous ties that reach back in time, all the way back to the sixties, that bind their families together in an inscrutable plot. When Samantha’s life is threatened, they reign in their prodding. “Maybe it’s not worth it,” she says. When Mulder becomes gravely ill in their fourth year together—undiagnosable brain trauma, voices clouding his mind, screams in a padded room—Scully scours the world to save him, and they realize that their holding back is pointless. In his apartment, she tells him she’d be lost without him. “I don’t ever want you to be lost,” he says, and he kisses her.

They bring down Blevins together, then Scully pulls the trigger and kills the man who claimed to be Mulder’s real father, who claimed to know what really happened to Charlie, who stalked the hallways of the Hoover building and began the plot that brought them together. He had no idea what he’d started, sending Mulder to her. He couldn’t know their strength when they were together.

“Why did you do it?” Mulder asks later.

“He was a liar,” she says.

Whatever plan there had been in the beginning, it was over now. Their future was their own.

 

**4.**  A conspiracy of men comes down in raging fire and blackened bodies. Scully has one final vision of Charlie, who smiles and tells her it’s over. “Except one last piece,” he says, and hands her a scrap of paper that she knows shouldn’t exist. It’s an address and a six-digit number: a key code. Mulder and Scully liberate six vials of an amber fluid from a vault in the Pentagon.

In a lab late one night, eyes red from no sleep, Scully asks, “Can you synthesize it?”

“I can,” Mulder says, and they know they can save the world.

His wire-rimmed glasses slide down on his nose, his hair sticks out in all directions, and she’s never loved him more. She puts her fingers in that messy hair and kisses him. It’s not only their future—the whole world has a future now. She tugs at his black sweater, tired smile on her face, and he puts his arms around her. “Let’s make a baby,” she whispers, lips to his chest. He grins into her hair and squeezes her tighter.

 

**5.**  Charles Scully Mulder is born into an inoculated world on January 6, 1999 in the middle of a snowstorm. While he’ll never know his grandfathers, both grandmothers and his two aunts make it to the hospital before the weather gets bad. His father, for all his science and medical knowledge, cannot help but believe in miracles. His mother—sweaty, tired, beautiful—tells him, “I told you so.”

The earth is still full of shadows and monsters. Evil seeps up from its cracks and into the lives of good people. Nature’s strange mutations wreak chaos in a human world that craves order. But two people, armed with badges, bullets, and a hefty flashlight or two, quietly beat back what darkness they can. They come home to their child, then children. They are balance: reason and faith; belief and doubt; hard edges and soft kisses. They save the world. A lot.

—

**A/N** : This was difficult to get started because the thought of Mulder as Mr. “I’m so rational,” mansplaining science to Scully for 9+ years was kind of nauseating, lol. I tweaked their personality traits a little bit to match the flip-flop, but I actually love this scenario because of the way it avoids all the terrible gendered/reproductive violence against Scully. Also, it makes room for her legit spooky side—her visions that are pretty consistent, canonically.


End file.
